New Fact Sheet: Social Barriers to Landscape Restoration After Fire

Public land agencies devote countless hours and millions of dollars to restoring landscapes after wildfires. Yet too often these efforts don’t succeed as well as we’d like. As part of an effort to improve post-fire recovery in the Great Basin, we asked managers what they perceived as barriers to effective restoration. It turns out the issue is as much about people as it is about the land.

In this fact sheet, we interviewed land managers who make decisions about post-fire rehabilitation and restoration. We explored barriers to improving post-fire recovery that included: policies and funding cycles that constrain managers’ ability to monitor and re-treat effectively, pressure and legal action from interest groups, pressure from concerned public/neighbors, climate change, and ecological debates such as native vs. non-native species use. These identified barriers provide a social-political-ecological framework that may influence on-the-ground manager decisions after wildfires in the Great Basin.